Biodiversity-focused Development

^“Sustainable development” and “sustainability” may be among the most used phrases across discourses, both mainstream and radical, on “development.” As in any conceptualisation, disciplinary frameworks and value judgments matter here as well. The goal of sustainable development is to meet the needs of the present generation, but in a way that it does not compromise the ability of future generations to use the same resources (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). Indeed, the resources in question are natural resources, primarily ecological systems.

There is a reasonable consensus on the three pillars of sustainable development—ecological, economic, and social—and the trade-offs among them across the disciplinary boundaries (Figure 1.1 in Munasinghe [1993]) are one of the earliest expositions. The connections between the economic, social and ecological systems are seen as three concentric circles (Figure 1, p 28) to convey dependence of the economic on the social and ecological, and of the social on the ecological. It follows that the sustainability of the economic system, which influences nature, and the type and speed of “development” are dependent on the sustainability of the ecological system, with the social systems (such as institutions and processes defining rights and responsibilities) “mediating” the bidirectional flows between ecological and economic systems (Figure 2.1 in UN [2014] is one of the latest examples).